The Prisoner
by RosemaryW
Summary: The world has fallen to the vampires. Hal and Eve meet for the first time as adults. A little series of scenes.


She had watched from the window as they dragged him from the van. Manacles binding his wrists and ankles, and a bag over his head. Overly cautious perhaps. There are ten men and one of him, but better safe than sorry. The manacles restrict his progress up the long driveway to little more than a shuffle, but he is propelled forwards by heavy hands on his shoulder and a stake to his back.

He stumbles more than once. Now that he is finally in their hands, they want to humiliate him. At one point one of the men shoves him to the floor. The group circles around him like rabid dogs. All feet and fists. They only stop when one of their number sees her disapproving face in the window and puts the onslaught to an end. They lift him back to his feet, and drag him towards the building door, his feet trailing in the gravel.

She watches the interrogation from behind the one way glass. They try everything to make him talk. The crosses and holy water don't make him so much as wince. They burn him with wolf blood, pry his nails from their beds, break his bones. Mainly he laughs. Taunts them, tells them the things he'll do to their wives, their daughters.

Eve steps back from the window. Its not that he doesn't deserve this. She doesn't think that there's any punishment that she could devise that he wouldn't deserve. But they're supposed to be the good ones in this war. Stooping to their enemy's level of brutality is a slippery slope, and they are well on their way to the bottom. By the time she walks away, he is almost unrecognisable. That pretty face, now little more than a mess of bruises. One eye socket is shattered, a hole burnt right through his cheek. His top lip is bust and his nose is broken. Still, he laughs at them.

Her friend, one of his interrogators leaves him in the cell alone and stands beside Eve. They both watch the prisoner through the one way glass.

'Did he tell you anything useful?' Eve asks, even though she already knows the answer.

Kate shakes his head. 'He told me what he would do to my corpse. A very detailed description it was too.' She lets the silence hang between them for a moment before he continues. When they first rose, I was a trainee doctor. Do no harm. Thats what we pledged back then. Seems quaint now. Feels like all I do is harm.'

'He's more than earned it.' Eve assures her.

'Doesn't matter. They're turning us into monsters. At least they have the excuse that they don't have souls.'

Eve doesn't like to think of souls. It reeks of destiny and fate. 'Do you think you can break him?'

'I can try.'

Eve walks away. She doesn't need to watch any more of this, doesn't want to.

She's never known a world that wasn't ruled over by creatures like Hal Yorke, and she hates them for that. Annie used to tell her stories about the old world, about holidays in the sun, about her parents, George and Nina. Annie used to say Eve reminded her Nina, small but fierce.

She hates that the vampires stole that life away from her, from all of them. But she hates it even more that they've made this level of cruelty acceptable.

She waits until the others are asleep before she goes to him.

He's been left strung up. Dangling from his wrists, toes barely brushing the floor. The light is dim, but she can still see the blood where the handcuffs are digging into his wrists.

She flicks a switch and the room is suddenly filled with harsh light. The prisoner finally looks at her. 'A funny time for a visit Eve.' He observes. 'No prying eyes…'

'We're not alone.' She lies. 'They're watching from behind the glass.'

'Liar.' He says. But its not accusatory. 'Your's is the only heartbeat I can hear.' A private audience with the War Child, I should be honoured.'

She hates the sound of her title coming from that mouth. Its normally said in awe, or at least with respect. But he mocks her with it. He might be the one in chains, but they both know that she is losing this war. She is the chosen one, the one who was supposed to save the world from the vampires. She had failed before she even took her first steps.

'So are you just going to stand their gawping at me?'

She turns around and walks away from him, to the pulley system that has him dancing on his toes. She turns the handle, lowering him back to the floor and then walks back to him.

He lets a long breath out and roles his shoulders back, or one of them at least. The other one looks dislocated. She doesn't pop it back in for him. She doesn't want to touch him.

'The others want to kill you.'

'They can join the queue.'

He's all bravado, but she can hear pain in his voice. 'You don't seem worried.'

'Do you know what happened when your friends in the French resistance killed Jacob?'

Eve does. But she lets him continue anyway.

'We rounded up one thousand prisoners in the Paris camp, locked them in barns, and burnt them to the ground. Where we could locate their families, we flayed them. Jacob was a lower rank than me.'

'Did you know that I used to change your nappy?'

His statement is so ridiculous that she can't help but laugh. But then she meets his eyes and there's a knowing look on his face that stills her heart. 'You're lying.'

'Tom, Annie and me A funny little group I'll admit, but they had their charms.'

Eve doesn't respond, but her mind is racing back through old memories: Annie switching off the wireless when Hal's voice rang out. That hollow look in Tom's eyes.

'Its understandable that they kept it quiet.' Hal shrugged. 'The aesthetics aren't great - the protectors of the War Child playing happy families with an Old One. It would have been a PR disaster for them if it had got out.'

'Why were you with them?'

'I was going through a phase.' He says flatly.

'Sounds like it would be as much of a PR disaster for you as it would have been for them, if it had got out.'

'I made the right decision in the end.' He responds. Voice hard.

She leaves the cell wondering why he told her that.

'Do you like seeing me like this?'

'You deserve everything that we do to you. Every cut and burn. You deserve them a thousand times over.'

'I didn't ask if you think I deserve it. I asked if you liked it.' He smiles a lopsided smile, a barely healed knife wound at the corner of his lips threatening to re-open.

'Sometimes things are necessary. Whether I like it is irrelevant.'

'I'm not going to talk, you know that. And you can't kill me for risk of reprisals.'

Eve says nothing.

'So there's no need for this. Yet you choose to do it anyway.'

'I haven't laid a finger on you.'

'You oversee it. Same thing. Your hands aren't clean Eve.'

'Says the butcher of London.'

'We're not all that dissimilar Eve.' He meets her eyes and smiles. 'Just think how good it would feel if you could let go.'

She watches him through the glass. She's certain he knows she's there, but she won't give him the satisfaction of confirming it. She thinks back to Annie and Tom. The thought of their faces still brings a tear to her eye. Tom had always been cold during her life. She knew he cared about her, but emotionally he was closed off. Now she wonders if Hal Yorke was the cause of that.

She had known Annie until she was sixteen and the world had become too much for her. Phasing in and out of the world until one day she had vanished. She had always believed that Annie had been open with her. She had even told her about Mitchell, though why anyone would fall in love with a vampire, Eve simply could not comprehend.

But Annie had never mentioned Hal. Maybe it was because of how the story ended. Mitchell had in the end died with some semblance of the man Annie had loved still in tact. Hal, well. Eve couldn't imagine how different he must have been back then for Annie to welcome him into their home. To leave him alone with a helpless baby.

The trade they arrange is a good one. Three of their best men in return for Hal Yorke. It's still a hard sell to her men. Much as they understand the scale of the reprisals were they to finally put a stake through that black heart, it still hurts to watch him go free. To think of all the people that will inevitably die at his hands. Eve thinks she would rather burn.

She doesn't go to the trade. It's too much of a risk to have her out in the open like that. Like her captive, she belongs in the shadows.

She visits him the night before. They've gone even harder on him today, trying to compensate for his imminent release she assumes. His hands are a mess of broken flesh and bone he can barely open his eyes from the swelling.

'Come to say goodbye?' he asks as she walks into the room.

'You didn't break them.' She says. 'Annie and Tom, you didn't break them.'

'I never wanted to.' He says softly.


End file.
